Technology and consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton is seeking to expand operations in Hawaii and across the Pacific amid U.S. tensions with China.
As military leaders look at potential vulnerability to hacking and spying operations, they’re looking to companies like Booz Allen — one of the military’s top contractors for tech and intelligence — to support the Pentagon’s buildup of forces in the region. Top company executives were in Hawaii last week to meet with local leaders and show off their new downtown office at the First Hawaiian Bank building.
“This region is one of our top priorities,” Judi Dotson, Booz Allen’s president for global defense, told a gathering of government and business leaders Monday. “We are committed to building this community and hiring locally — and building out our diverse force so that we can enable the military to not just fight tonight, but to fight now, with capabilities that are proven and ready.”
The company has 30,000 employees around the world, with about 300 in Hawaii and 500 across the Pacific. Its first Hawaii client was Kamehameha Schools, with that tie initiated six decades ago, noted CEO Horacio Rozanski, an Argentine immigrant who began at the company as an intern.
“The last time I was here, before COVID, I had a chance to visit (Kamehameha Schools),” said Rozanski. “The report that we wrote in 1961, it was still in use.”
Booz Allen has changed in the decades since. Now 60% of its business worldwide is in military and defense contracts. In Hawaii such contracts account for all of its business here. But Rex Jordan, the company’s Honolulu-based senior vice president overseeing Pacific operations, said the company wants to be engaged with Hawaii beyond just defense-focused projects.
“We want to make sure that we’re a part of the fabric of this community,” said Jordan. “And so you’ll see us engaged across the spectrum, from elementary school, to high school, to the local community, to the colleges.”
State officials have been looking to military and defense contractors like Booz Allen in hopes that they’ll create opportunities for young people pursuing science and technology jobs and help build Hawaii’s tech workforce.
“The decision to go away from relying on our traditional pillars of our economy — agriculture (and) tourism — was quite frankly a necessity,” said newly elected U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda, D-Hawaii, during a panel discussion with Booz Allen executives at the Banker’s Club. “For so many of us, our greatest export that we were watching leave our shores was our children — for better jobs, for houses that they could afford.”
Booz Allen has touted its financial contributions and local involvement with programs and nonprofits promoting science and technology education like Hawaii FIRST Robotics and ‘Ohana Kilo Hoku, which aims to get Native Hawaiian youth involved in space and astronomy programs. It also has partnered with the University of Hawaii’s Hacking 4 Defense program.
Cammy Lai, 24, a Kalani High School graduate working for Booz Allen in Honolulu, studied robotics as a teenager. She majored in computer science at UH and started at Booz Allen as an intern before getting hired on full time. She said most of her classmates are leaving the islands for the mainland to find work in tech and science even as contractors like Booz Allen are growing — and hiring — in Hawaii.
Kaimi Kahihikolo, 26, a Kamehameha Schools and UH grad who majored in astronomy and astrophysics, is a data scientist at Booz Allen. Kahihikolo said he found his way to the company through a technology club. He said it’s possible that many would-be local applicants just aren’t aware of the opportunities.
But at this time some Hawaii residents also are reevaluating their relationship with the military and defense contractors.
The military’s handling of toxic materials — particularly after the November 2021 fuel spill at the underground Red Hill facility, which tainted the Navy’s Oahu water system, as well as a spill of 700 gallons of fuel this month at the Space Force’s Maui Space Surveillance Complex at the summit of Haleakala — has drawn pushback.
However, company execs insist they want to boost innovation across all sectors in Hawaii. Chief Technology Officer Susan Penfield said, “We’d love to learn more about what Hawaii is doing from a startup perspective and explore that, and potentially work with some of your startups or invest.”
Rozanski said the company is working to “do a better job of telling our story so that people can actually make a better judgment as to whether this is the place for them.”
Booz Allen made headlines in 2013 after one of its employees in Hawaii, Edward Snowden, made off with a trove of classified files and fled to Hong Kong and eventually to Russia, where he is now a citizen. Snowden shared the documents with reporters, which revealed a vast domestic spying program by the U.S. government — as well as files on a wide array of intelligence-gathering programs run by the U.S. and its allies around the world.
The leaks put the company and its clients under the microscope, both from those who maintained that they had allowed a massive security failure in trusting Snowden as well as by those who contended that Snowden exposed the ways the government and contractors violate the privacy of American citizens.
“He was with us for a short period of time, and we strongly believe that what he did was illegal and anti-American,” said Rozanski. “(But) he happened to be with us when he did what he did, and so it forced us to work with our clients to rethink all of our processes. The way in which we hire now is different than it was years ago. The way in which we manage our talent is different than it was years ago.”
The recent appearance of an apparent Chinese spy balloon over the mainland offered a glimpse into the many ways that countries spy on one another and sparked public debate. But behind closed doors, many officials are focused on cyber threats. As the internet has connected global communication and business, it has also opened the door to new threats.
“We get so enamored and so excited by the technology and the promise of the technology that we forget that somebody’s going to use it for something bad,” said Rozanski.
In 2022, businesses and government agencies across Oahu were targeted in a series of cyberattacks and attempted attacks, including a thwarted attack on an undersea cable that links Hawaii and other Pacific islands to critical telecommunications systems that make the internet and cellphones function. But in most cases officials were vague in discussing who exactly was behind the attacks.
Jordan said “the thing about cyber, and the fact that we do have a worldwide web, is the fact that folks can get pretty proficient in malicious activity without having a whole lot of infrastructure to do that, and so those threats can come from virtually any location.”
Rozanski said the company has a much larger footprint in Europe, where it has assisted in monitoring Russian military activity in Ukraine. But it’s the Pentagon’s fears about China that are prompting Booz Allen’s Pacific-focused shift.
China is locked in a series of disputes with neighboring countries over territorial and navigation rights in the South China Sea, a critical waterway through which a third of all international trade travels, raising worries of potential blockades or conflict that could disrupt the global economy. Beijing considers the entire sea its exclusive territory and has built bases on disputed islands and reefs to assert its claims.
Tensions have especially escalated between China and Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing considers a rogue province and that Chinese leader Xi Jinpeng has vowed to bring under its control — by military force if necessary. Taiwan is a key trade partner for the U.S. and a key provider of semiconductors that many American companies depend on to make their products work.
Tokuda pointed out, “The reality is, we’re also very much on the front lines; anything that happens on either continent, we’re right in between.” She added, “It’s at our doorstep — and we really understand what it means to be concerned with its expansion or aggression, what it means to make sure that we are in a strong defense position.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Kaimi Kahihikolo’s last name.
